[118228] in Cypherpunks
IP: Big Brother Is Your Friend
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Sep 22 08:12:09 1999
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Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 06:57:01 -0400
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From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 22:52:04 -0500
To: Ignition-Point <ignition-point@precision-d.com>
From: Jan <Igniting@ticnet.com>
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Big Brother Is Your Friend
by Chris Gaither
9:15 a.m. 20.Sep.99.PDT
BERKELEY, California -- The omnipresent cameras are coming, says
science fiction writer David Brin. The question isn't when, but what
they'll be pointing at.
Surveillance cameras will be perched on every lamppost and
windowsill, beaming the minutiae of daily life to police
headquarters. Street crime will plummet, Brin says.
After all, look at the low crime rate in Britain, where watchful
bobbies have access to more than 500,000 cameras.
It doesn't stop there in Brin's future world. Everyone carries a
camera, beaming images straight to the Internet. A cop pulls over a
kid for speeding, and the whole scene is played out in the public
domain.
"What will the result be when this happens? A dramatic increase in
professionalism and in legitimate arrests, and also an incredible
renaissance in sarcasm on our city streets," Brin said at Saturday's
California First Amendment Assembly at the University of California,
Berkeley. "Because nothing like this will ever change human nature."
"Now,you may not like this image, but anybody who tries to harm you
is going to get caught," he said.
Brin, an astrophysicist and author of such novels as The Postman,
painted this surreal vision for attendees pondering whether freedom
and privacy can coexist in the next millennium, when businesses and
the government will probably know more about you than you know about
yourself.
Because whether we like it or not, Brin said, the cameras are
imminent. The government already uses them as its eyes and databases
as its memory.
"All you accomplish by banning them is making sure that elites have
the powers of gods, and that you don't," he said.
Take, for example, increased monitoring in the workplace, where
bosses can count their employees' keystrokes and time their bathroom
breaks.
Here's Brin's solution: Turn the cameras around to the top 50 execs
in the company. Bosses can still spy on you, but you get to spy right
back.
"Given a choice between privacy and accountability, all of us can be
relied upon to choose privacy for ourselves and accountability for
everybody else," Brin said.
Brin's vision was not universally shared. Earlier in the day, an
attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation
put forth the alternative solution to what she called the rash of
"data Valdez incidents that spill information out to anyone who wants
to see it."
Citing such security breaches as Microsoft's baring of millions of
Hotmail accounts and the exposure of customers' credit cards numbers
on an Italian smut site, assistant staff counsel Deborah Pierce
pushed for stricter limitations of information sharing.
She called for banks and other consumer services to curtail their
creation of mammoth personal-info databases and for Big Brother to
chill out -- a view Brin would find naive.
"We need to stop the government's current fetish for collecting more
information than it really needs," she said.
But the information flow works both ways, Brin said. To prove his
point, he laid out this paradox: "In all of human history, no
government has ever known more about its people than our government
knows about us. And [yet] in all of human history, no people have
ever been anywhere near as free."
Open government, gadflies, and a vigilant press reconcile the
conundrum, he said, because, "In all of human history, no people knew
as much about their government."
Related Wired Links:
US Still Pushing Crypto Control
21.Jun.99
Court Limits Online Speech
11.Feb.99
http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/21840.html
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
